Some Polyvalent Intra- and Inter-Textualities in Fasti 3

Abstract

The voluminous nature of Ovid’s corpus lends itself to the study of intratextuality, as does the poet’s self-aware style. The Fasti is a particularly rich field for such examination, partly becomes it appears late in the poet’s life so there is a large amount of material to recall, but especially because the poem itself belongs to two periods. Initial composition was alongside the Metamorphoses — these were the works Ovid was working on before he was dispatched to Tomi,1 and each shows awareness of the other;2 but the published version, addressed to Germanicus, is Tiberian, and explicitly refers to his exile in book 4 (79-84). Consequently, by the time he issued the work readers were in a position to observe any links with most of the books of exile poetry. We cannot know in most cases whether the text of the Fasti has been left unchanged since the departure from Rome in A.D. 8; but leaving a text unchanged is an authorial decision, and it is quite possible for a passage of the Tristia to allude to the Fasti and the same passage of the Fasti to allude to the same passage of the Tristia.3